Eating Glue, and so on

I managed to make it through 36 years of life without ever eating glue. Up until yesterday. Yesterday I was sitting at the table with my kids, cleaning up our lunch dishes at co-op. I moved a lid and felt something wet on my hand. It was a little white smear. They'd eaten go-gurts earlier, so I thought nothing of it and just licked it off.

Not yogurt.

The 6yo had a class project sitting next to our dishes, and the class project had huge globs of wet glue. Which is, of course, what I'd just eaten.

In case you're wondering, it was gross. Not the worst thing I've ever eaten (that would be horseradish), but I'd definitely never eat it on purpose. I had to eat an orange slice and a big bite of cake to try to get rid of the flavor, and even then it felt like it was sticking to my tongue. (Sticking. Har har.)

So, there's that item off my bucket list.


In other news, the 2yo is currently even more crazy about reading than his sisters. Yesterday morning he woke up around 5:30 wailing, "Read a book!" Which was pretty much how he'd fallen asleep the night before too.

Also, we were playing with wiki sticks earlier in the week, and I made the letters for the 6yo's name, so the 2yo wanted me to do it for him too. I did, and I spelled out his name while pointing at the letters. It was fun, and then he started jumbling them around and picking up each letter and saying it was his name. Good golly, 2yos are cute.

The next day while I was showering he toddled in (I have got to start locking that door!) holding a bunch of wiki sticks in his hands and saying, "Letters!" Also ridiculously cute. But you probably had to be there to understand.

On second thought, you shouldn't be there. Because I was showering and all.


Now for a teaser: Soon I hope to regale you with tales of our trip to Londontown and my giddy jumping-up-and-down excitement over getting to use a drop spindle. It was good times!

Also, maybe I'll get around to updates on my teen writing class and our epic anthology!

Before Moonlight There Was Mathcounts

So, by now you probably know all about the Oscars mishap where La La Land got told they won, but ... they didn't.

Well, I'm here to tell you I've been there and done that, in a way more geeky junior high sort of way.

It was the year 1995, and my teammates and I were at the national MathCounts competition. After a whole slew of different events--including nerdy mathematical interludes when the judges asked things like, "How many digits of pi have you memorized?"--we were announced as placing fifth out of the fifty-seven teams! We were both thrilled and shocked. Especially given how much goofing off we'd been doing.

Um yeah, we actually placed twentieth.

Naturally we drowned our sorrows in junk food, many rounds of card games, and a lot of tween angst. Also a lot of geekiness. Fortunately, we all recovered.

Here's the news article chronicling our tragedy: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/418107/MATH-OFFICIALS-CANT-ADD-UTAHNS-ARE-20TH-NOT-5TH.html?pg=all

Of particular note: the insanely pretentious answer I apparently gave to the question of future plans. Seriously? Could I possibly get more show-offy sounding? But it was good for a guffaw just now, so I'll call it a win.

Too bad it wasn't also a win for my MathCounts team.

The Birth Story, Part II: Donuts and Music and Scarfy Things, Oh My!

Note: You can find part I and its associated warnings here.

So now we’ll start to fast forward through some of this day, hitting just the “good parts.” (And yet still in excruciating, four-part detail!)

* Around 9 a.m., I realized I had never put together a playlist of music to listen to while in labor. So I tossed about seven songs into a group and put it on repeat. Because I had exactly enough brain power to come up with about seven songs. Actually, I had less brain power than that because I had actually come up with most of them in my head previously and had just never done anything about it. These songs were on repeat for many hours of the day, but I barely noticed them. I was probably the only one. At one point, Meghan (who I assume was going crazy from having to listen to “A Thousand Years” or “Little Wonders” for the seven thousandth time) casually asked, “So, do you just have this playlist on repeat?” Um, yes. Yes, I did. (I think I turned it off after that, thereby saving my birth team from the edge of madness.)

* I brought in the whole crew around 10 a.m. Susan, our wonderful midwife. Laurie, the birth assistant. Meghan, friend, photographer, and bring of donuts. There was the checking of the heartbeat (but the absolutely-not-on-your-life-no-checking of the dilation). There was some friendly chitchat, and everyone settled in to my living room to give me some space to sleep or whatever I wanted in my room.

* I was still laughing, still totally relaxed, still capable of carrying on conversations. If you’ve gone through the Bradley method of training for birth, you’re thinking, “Oh, Jeanna, you’re not even close to ready to give birth.” And you’re right. This was early labor, folks. Really early labor.

See? Still totally in early labor.

* I spent inordinate amounts of time worrying about the people in my household. They were all there, waiting on me. Waiting on me. Egad, the nerves. The performance anxiety. Laurie had a test to study for—I was keeping her from it. (I really wasn’t; she studied at my house.) Meghan had her very own newborn—I was keeping her from him. (I really was, but she was terribly gracious about it, and she left to take care of him a time or two.) In retrospect, the best plan would have been to send them all home. I could have called them back again when things picked up. But the paranoia, remember—this baby could pop, right? That’s what everyone was always saying about third babies. “They just pop out!” “Shorter and shorter labors!” (And since my second labor was really only active for about four hours, I felt justifiably concerned.)

We must be ready!

* Brice read to me for a while from some excessively cheesy romance novel I had on my kindle at the moment. That was embarrassing, largely because it involved cringing at the plotline. (I think there may have been time travel involved. Or past lives? Or both? I don’t remember; I think I blocked it.)

Apparently the scarf is called a rebozo.
Also, I think I spent about twenty minutes
total on that ball. But at least it was fun
for the girls to play with!

* At one point in the meltingly hot afternoon, I tossed a t-shirt over my tank top and headed outside to walk (waddle) up and down our street. While I did this . . . not a single contraction. Not one. I came back from the walk and stated casually, when asked, that I didn’t think the walk had helped much. I was lying, desperately trying to pretend that things were further along than they were.

* Laurie suggested some sort of homeopathic hoo-ha to try to nudge labor along (“See! I knew they were getting impatient,” I thought to myself), and I said, “Why not?” I have no idea if it worked, but let’s just say it did. Laurie also suggested, when the contractions finally started picking up, a neato scarfy-wrappy thingie around my belly. It helped for some contractions, and I wanted to rip it off and burn it to oblivion for others. Ah, labor.

Still, over the hours it slowly became obviously that labor was finally picking up.

Stay tuned for part III, in which things get hairy.

Update: A friend asked me about the purpose of a rebozo. Here's how I saw it: You know how when you're pregnant and you sneeze, you think your whole abdomen is about to explode into fiery shreds of what used to be muscles and ligaments and such? So when you feel a sneeze coming, you bend over and wrap your arms around your belly? To me, the rebozo was kind of like that. However, if you ask the internet, they don't talk about that. Instead it's about positioning and relaxing and whatnot. Sooo . . . I hope you feel enlightened now.

Embarrassment, Curry, and Other Good Stuff

Because Semi-Public Humiliation Just Isn’t Enough

You may have thought I wrote that letter, Hello, Jordan Sandberg, solely to amuse and horrify my current friends and family. You would be wrong. Through the magic of Facebook, I sent it to poor, unsuspecting “Jordan,” with whom I have had no contact for about 12 years. (And he even wrote back). It’s funny, really, because this event that was so monumental in my mind … he didn’t remember it. Oh yeah, he remembered liking me and all (phew! I’m not delusional), and he alluded to some other embarrassments (because, honestly, there were certainly enough to go around). But the ice skating incident … nada. Life is weird that way.

Please let it be noted, however, that he did remember my ability to read and walk at the same time. And he considered it one of my definite selling points.

Drum Roll, Please … The Lit Blitz

As you may recall, today my story gets posted to the Mormon Artist blog, and you can read it here. In case you are lacking for words to describe the sheer magnificence of my writing, I have taken the liberty of making some suggestions:

“Dear Jeanna,

Your story was brilliant. Like War and Peace, only shorter. Like Hamlet, except with fewer dead people. Like Finnegan’s Wake, but, you know, coherent. More moving than gravity. More touching than a toddler in a toy store. Truly, you have changed my life.

Sincerely, [insert your name here]”

This is just a suggestion, you understand.

Too Much Curry

It turns out that we are constitutionally incapable of making small batches of curry. What was supposed to be a “small” pot last week turned into a meal to feed about 8 or 9 hungry adults. Hooray for leftovers!

Sulking

A few days ago, we were eating some Valentine’s chocolate for dessert, and Coriel started begging for more. I told her, in a remarkably gentle voice, that she couldn’t have any more. Immediately she started to cry this wail that was just verging on fake. Then she paused, ran over to the couch, flopped on it, and started crying again. A moment later, she stopped again suddenly, looked up at me, and said, “That’s called sulking.” After which she began to cry again. She did not receive more candy.

Wearing, if I remember correctly, three jackets
and a few pairs of gloves.

Coats and Hats and Mittens, oh my!

Recently Addra is super jazzed about wearing as much clothing as possible. She sees jackets hanging on the rack by our front door or the rack in Coriel’s room, and she is determined that she must put them on. She points emphatically and makes that cute grunty-squeaky imploring noise “unh unh unh” until I take the coat down and put it on her. Then she wanders off to find another coat. Or mitten. Or sock. Or whatever.

P.S. And a thanks to Heather at Women in the Scriptures for getting me thinking about Five Things for Friday in the first place; join in the blog hopping fun.

Hello, Jordan Sandberg

Hello, Jordan Sandberg.*

Remember me? We knew each other way back when. We went to school and church together. You were a year older than me. I don’t remember how we first met, and I have absolutely no idea why you liked me, but apparently you did. And now here I am, looking you up out of the blue and sending you a letter.

Don’t worry. I’m not hitting on you. Happily married I am. Two adorable daughters. So seriously, not hitting on you or stalking you. This is probably making you wonder: why exactly am I writing to you?

Well, I have to make a confession. You may or may not remember this incident, but I sure do. (Although the crazy part of me says, “Of course he remembers it! How could he forget something so life altering as a teenage crush? It probably scarred him for life; I’m sure he never recovered.”—but don’t worry about the crazy voice; I mostly ignore her.) I remember it so viscerally that I still cringe when I imagine it.

So I thought, well, there’s only one way to get past all that embarrassment. Share it really, really publicly! Let everyone else revel in my mortification! Especially make sure Jordan sees it!

And here we all are. The confession awaits…

I think I was in seventh grade, or maybe eighth. You were in the grade above me but not really on my mind. I think I had a crush on Peter Fletcher. My friend and I were at the ice skating rink. So were you.

We saw you there. We glanced furtively, we giggled, we pretended you didn’t exist. But we felt your presence. Boys. Our age. Whom we knew. Be still our beating hearts.

So we skated and we watched you surreptitiously. We tossed our hair. We laughed with just a shade more enthusiasm. We tried to broadcast a signal: “We are awesome and amazing women. We are having a fantastic time without any boys. But perhaps, if you draw closer, you’ll have a fantastic time too.”

But we were seventh graders, so we probably weren’t doing a very good job. You were also in middle school, and therefore also completely clueless.

And then I took a break, leaning against the rail and watching the other skaters zipping by. You must have seen your chance. Following time honored tradition, you sent Peter to talk to me.

“Hey, Jeanna,” he said as he toepicked to a stop.

“Hey.” Awkward small talk.

“Sooo… Jordan asked me to come over here and talk to you.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. He wanted to know… will you go out with him?”

Do you remember my response? Did you ever really know it, or did Peter somehow soften it for you? I remember what I said, word for word (granted, two words are not all that difficult to remember).

“No. Never.”

Let us pause and zoom out for a moment, shall we? Let us consider for a moment all the ways in a which a nice girl can reject the advances of an unwanted suitor. “I’ve got a boyfriend in Kentucky.” “My parents wouldn’t let me.” Even “You’re so awesome, I’m just not good enough for you.”

So why would a presumably nice girl like me answer like that?

Let us now rewind a few seconds and zoom in. Let us eavesdrop on the radio chatter in my mind.

“He did?” I said. Even someone as socially awkward as I was knew what “he wants me to talk to you” meant. I was suddenly a deer, frozen, staring idiotically at approaching headlights. My brain whirred fuzzily, my adrenaline glands took over, I was getting stupider by the nanosecond.

Oh my gosh, said the voice in my head. Jordan likes me? I had no idea.

Wow, that’s totally flattering.

And completely unexpected. Agh! What do I do?

Well, I can’t “go out” with him. I mean, yes, it doesn’t actually mean dating like the “can’t date before you’re sixteen” thing. We’re not going to go anywhere really. Right? Doesn’t “go out” pretty much just mean say hi in the halls and, I dunno, send each other dumb notes and sappy Valentines? That’s not a big deal, right?

I think it might be the end of the world as we know it, actually.

Dad would kill me.

Dad wouldn’t have to know.

Dad would know.

I don’t even know if I like Jordan. Honestly, I’ve never really considered it.

But he asked you out! Somehow he noticed you. Let’s just enjoy the ego stroking for a minute here, please.

It can’t last. He’d realize how wacky we are and probably dump us in about a week.

Hey, a week is good.

But it’s so weird. I don’t know how I feel about this whole “going out” thing anyway. I need at least an hour to analyze it.

Really, the best thing would be for us to just say “no” politely and explain to him why we can’t go out now but if he could just wait a couple years, that would be super cool and we could go to a movie or dinner or just on a walk or something. Yes, we’ll just tell him we’re flattered and we would love to go out… in about three years.

“No. Never.”

What? Did we really just say that? My internal jaw dropped. No, we couldn’t possibly have said that. We had a beautiful, polite, even downright poetic response planned. Our mouth could not have betrayed us this way.**

And that, Jordan, is the answer to the question of my, ahem, lack of tact. My voice betrayed me. It really wasn’t my fault.***

I hope you will find it comforting and/or amusing to discover the following:

Shortly after your offer and my rejection, I developed a crush on you.

This crush lasted, to varying degrees, for … oh, something like three or four years. Maybe a little more? I can’t remember for sure, but I do have “Jordan S’s missionary scripture” scrawled in my old copy of the Book of Mormon, and I wouldn’t have bothered with writing that if I’d been completely over you.

This crush caused me to do a number of embarrassingly girlie things, including (but not limited to):

• Frequently walking home the long way so I could go by your house just in case I might accidentally run into you.
• Reading The Chosen (quite visibly, at our ward’s youth conference, where you would see me reading it) just because I heard you say it was good. (Thanks for that, by the way. I really liked that book.)
• Paying attention to pretty much everything about you in a slightly obsessive, but not fully stalkerly, manner (I got to recognize most of your wardrobe pretty well).
• (Speaking of your wardrobe) Deciding that I really really reaaaally liked that olive greenish sweater you owned. Sigh.
• Trying to capture your attention once with this elaborately written out dumb joke about Descartes and sandwiches that I showed you and you were supposed to take and treasure but that you just looked at, read, and handing back to me without even thinking about how you were crushing my soul by your cavalier blank look.

So, I think that’s that. Now you know. Now, if you ever wondered why, you have the answer. And if you didn’t wonder, you can at least accept my massively embarrassing admission as… well… massively embarrassing.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled life.

Sincerely,

Jeanna

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent (you) and the embarrassed (me).

**You may be wondering at this point why my internal monologue is sometimes spoken in the plural. I don’t know. Maybe it makes it easier to argue with myself.

***You may have also wondered why I never responded to that note you stuck in my locker. The answer is this: It fell to the bottom of my locker, was quickly buried in moldering piles of whatnot, and was not discovered until about a month or two later.